Imus is off the air. For now, anyway.
The shock jock who touched off a media frenzy with his ugly comments last week about the Rutgers’ women’s basketball team (I won’t repeat them — if you haven’t heard them by now, you probably don’t care about this), broadcast as part of a larger and longer bit of ugliness, was unceremoniously dumped by CBS Radio one day after MSNBC announced the cancellation of its simulcast of his show.
I’ve been struggling with the Imus situation for several days. I am, as I think I wrote earlier, a bit uncomfortable with the notion that anyone, even someone like Imus who regularly spouts garbage, be denied a forum for their views. I never called for his dismissal, though I can’t blame CBS for getting out from under the controversy.
This is not, as some might like to think, a case of censorship. The government isn’t shutting down speech. Nor is it a case of corporate censorship, which I’d define as the powerful shutting down critics (think of the cancellation of Bill Maher’s show in 2001 because he pricked the sensibilities of the Bush administration by characterizing the 9/11 terrorists differently than the president and his minions liked).
This was a corporate entity reacting to the larger community — it was speech being met with more speech, it was the bigot being shouted down and ultimately chased from his pulpit. It was the powerful — a morning radio host earning a reported $10 million a year, a host who has been rubbing shoulders with presidential candidates and other power-brokers, a host who has made his reputation primarily by shocking for shock’s sake and belittling the powerless in the process — being held to account for tangling with the wrong bunch.
This is about his somewhat less-than-genuine apology — if he was serious why has he opted to take a defensive stance? Why argue with Matt Lauer, of all people? — and a pattern of ugly commentary. This is about Imus — but also about all the other purveyors of this kind of junk, and that includes Howard Stern, most of the new generation of hip-hop artists, hair-metal rockers, right-wing ranters, and a whole lot more.
There are a lot of reasons this thing had media legs — this story in The New York Times offers an interesting explanation that unfortunately places the “toxicity” of what he said on an equal footing with the new imperatives at work on the media landscape.
This was not a Michael Richards moment. Richards’ comment was disseminated widely because because of the Web, and he managed to dig himself deeper with his own awkward apologies. But Richards was a has-been with little cultural clout and no history of this kind of thing. His was an ugly, horrible reaction to a heckler, not part of a larger, seemingly premeditated attack.
So Imus is gone. The question is what does this mean? Does this signal a narrowing of public discourse, a victory for the PC crowd? I don’t think so. This is not the banning of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” because of its use of the N-word. This was a radio host trafficking in ugly stereotypes in an effort to generate cheap laughs being met by a public so angry at his gratuitous attack that it turned a historical hierarchy on its head (rich white man v. black women) and punished the host. This was, as I said, speech being met with speech.
I’m hopeful that this signals a growing awareness that people like Imus — and Howard Stern, and the Jersey Guys, and so-called political commentators like Ann Coulter and Michael Savage — add nothing to the discourse and, in fact, do nothing more than poison the atmosphere.
My hope is that more and more people will challenge these hate-mongers with more and better speech, that the audiences will shrivel and the hosts will find themselves battling a well-deserved irrelevancy.
Now that would be the First Amendment in action.
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Hank Kalet 